When was C ever a toy? Perhaps the minis on which it was absolutely necessary, but was there EVER between its 1968 introduction and 1988 total domination of minis & micros, a time when it wasn’t essentially THE way to do anything more complex than what you’d do in ASM?

(Not that I’m a huge fan, having only recently been forced into using it, and cursing all the awful syntax, the stupid choices that could’ve better been made by copying Pascal, all in the name of keystroke & compiled-results efficiency that were slow to be realized because of its unruliness. But that’s another story. I never saw C as a toy, rather a sharp knife with dull spots that made it dangerous.)